Professor Katie Watson teaches medical ethics, humanities, and law to medical students and students in the NU masters program in medical humanities and bioethics. She is a recipient of the Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence, the medical school's Gender Equity Award and Joost Award for large group lecturing, and she was elected a Hastings Center Fellow in 2024.

Professor Watson received her JD from New York University School of Law, and before becoming an academic she clerked in the federal judiciary, worked as an appellate public defender for death row inmates, practiced poverty law at Legal Aid of Chicago, and practiced health law at the firm of Ross & Hardies. She completed fellowships in clinical medical ethics (University of Chicago Medical School MacLean Center) and medical humanities (Feinberg School of Medicine) and joined the FSM faculty, leaving part-time in 2017-18 to serve as Senior Counsel for the ACLU-IL Women’s and Reproductive Rights project.

In bioethics Professor Watson is best known for her scholarship in abortion ethics, practice, and law. Her articles on these topics have appeared in publications including JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, the American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB), and The New Yorker, and when abortion is in the news she is regularly interviewed and quoted in media outlets including CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. She is the author of the book Scarlet A: The Ethics, Law, and Politics of Ordinary Abortion (2018 Oxford) which the NYT review described as “revolutionary” and the NYT recently recommended as one of “Ten Books to Understand the Abortion Debate in the United States,” and she is the co-editor of the book Reproductive Ethics in Clinical Practice (2021 Oxford).

In the medical humanities Professor Watson is best known for using her theater background as an improvisor, a playwright, and an adjunct faculty member at the training center of Chicago's Second City theatre (2008-16) to conceptualize gallows humor in medicine, and to create a new medical communication training technique called “medical improv.” In 2002 she created what appears to be the country’s first medical school improv seminar, in 2011 she coined the term “medical improv” in her Academic Medicine article describing her method and data, and in 2013 she began leading a yearly Train-the-Trainer workshop. Her medical improv curriculum is now taught by the over 300 alumni of this program in medical schools and other health care training settings across the country, it was featured in the AAMC’s 2020 report “The Fundamental Role of the Arts and Humanities in Medical Education” (2020), and she has presented keynotes, grand rounds, and workshops at medical schools, hospitals, and conferences across the country.

Professor Watson has been a member of the Northwestern Memorial Hospital Ethics Committee for over 15 years, and she is currently a Board member of the Midwest Access Coalition and a member of the ethics committee of the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO). She is a former member of the Board of ASBH (the American Society for Bioethics & Humanities), the Editorial Board of the AMA Journal of Ethics, the Board of National Abortion Federation (NAF, the professional organization of independent abortion clinics), and of the National Medical Council of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (NMC-PPFA).